15 May 2012

Is Vendor Lock-in Unavoidable When Building An App?

In our continuing series of SEP group Practical Software podcast interviews, Bishop Greg, an expert in Model Driven software projects at Inegranova, talks about how organizations building their own internal applications are increasingly finding themselves locked into particular vendors and technology stacks similar to the ‘80s and ‘90s when people were building applications on custom systems from companies like DEC and IBM. In Greg’s experience these lock-ins can be avoided by working at high level models which can be easily transposed onto varying underlying technology stacks without too much trouble. One example Greg gives is a customer of his who swiftly moved a custom app to support Web Sphere and DB2.

Maybe every organization has to bite the bullet and take a dependency on specific technologies at some point. For example, trying to build a cross-platform mobile app can sometimes wind up with software that is mediocre, not really taking advantage of any of the key features on individual mobile devices.